Looking For The Disappearing Glaciers

But it now appears that the estimate about Himalayan glacial melt was based on a decade-old interview of one climate scientist
in a science magazine, The New Scientist, and that hard scientific
evidence to support that figure is lacking. The scientist, Dr. Syed
Hasnain, a glacier specialist with the government of the Indian state
of Sikkim and currently a fellow at the TERI research institute
in Delhi, said in an e-mail message that he was “misquoted” about the
2035 estimate in The New Scientist article. He has more recently said
that his research suggests that only small glaciers could disappear
entirely.

The panel, which relies on contributions from
hundreds of scientists, is considering whether to amend the estimate or
remove it.

So the IPCC relies on some combination of peer-reviewed scientific papers and articles they stumble across in the press which may or not accurately characterize a scientist's conclusions?

Dare we ask if this is standard practice at the IPCC? The Times nearly does:

The flawed estimate raises more questions about the panel’s vetting
procedures than it does about the melting of Himalayan glaciers, which
most scientists believe is a major problem.

As I noted a few days back as well as in December, the IPCC was almost surely aware of their dubious sourcing when they wrote the report, since they footnoted a World Wildlife Fund report from 2005 rather than a specific research paper. And as the Times notes, they included the 2035 claim in the full report but dropped it elsewhere:

He noted that the potentially erroneous figure in question had appeared
only in the panel’s full report of more than 1,000 pages and had been
omitted in later summary documents that the panel produced to guide
policy. The summaries said only that the Himalayan glaciers “could
decay at very rapid rates” if warming continued. Such documents are
produced after panel members review a full-length report, although if a
figure in the report is deemed to be in error, it is supposed to be
removed.

Is that supposed to reassure me? It is having the opposite effect.

UPDATE: The BBC reports that the IPCC is dropping the glacier claim. This BBC article from December is very good.

Jeez, this is being a really annoying day. There's this story, which I'm working on now; there's a new book out on Climategate, which we're running on PJTV and will have a review on shortly, there's the haiti stuff, and there's the Pachauri cash for climate story, which is going to be big.

Anyway, I'm not going to drop all the good stuff in the dress rehearsal, but this is important: there had been a lot of other cases — Pielke Jr has written about them — where the results that showed up in the IPCC reports weren't as well supported as they claimed, but they required reading the technical papers to understand. This one now is clear to anyone — the "peer reviewed science" reduced to a hidden reference to a telephone conversation reported in a secondary source publication.

PARIS - A top scientist said Monday he had warned in 2006 that a prediction of catastrophic loss of Himalayan glaciers, published months later by the UN's Nobel-winning climate panel, was badly wrong.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report said in 2007 it was "very likely" that the glaciers, which supply water to more than a billion people across Asia, would vanish by 2035 if global warming trends continued.

"This number is not just a little bit wrong, but far out of any order of magnitude," said Georg Kaser, an expert in tropical glaciology at the University of Innsbruck in Austria.

"It is so wrong that it is not even worth discussing," he told AFP in an interview.

I'm pretty sure I had visited surfacestations.org before that, and I don't have the putative responsibility of being the guy in charge of disseminating information about science to the readership of the Paper of Record.

You missed other hypocritical statements in the last two parapraphs. First: "There is mounting proof that accelerating glacial melt is occurring, although the specifics are poorly defined, in part because these glaciers are remote and poorly studied."

You got that? There's mouning proof of glacial melt but we really don't understand much about how it works.

And then there is: “Studies indicate that by 2030 another 30 percent will disappear; by 2050, 40 percent; and by the end of the century 70 percent.” He added: “Actually we don’t know much about process and impacts of the disappearance. That’s why we need an international effort.”

So there's a 70% chance they'll disappear although they don't actually know much about the process.